The Trond Mohn Research Foundation supports ovarian cancer project
CCBIO's Co-Director Line Bjørge receives support for her group's project "Rethinking Ovarian Cancer: Developing Diagnostic and Functional Tools and Designing Innovative Multimodal Treatment Strategies."
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This was through the Trond Mohn Research Foundation (TMF) special call for Women Health projects, where the University of Bergen and Haukeland University Hospital nominated 8 projects after a screening process. 4 of these will receive funding, including Line Bjørge's project.
In Norway, 500 women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer annually. Despite the initial response to treatment, most will relapse, and the survival rate is still low. For the integration of immunotherapy to succeed, tumor heterogenicity and the immunosuppressive microenvironment must be better understood.
Line Bjørge's team proposed a project to enhance our understanding of ovarian cancer immunobiology, develop new immune profiling tools for biomarker identification and functional testing, and establish procedures for surgery-assisted immunotherapy. The aim is to achieve this through a translational biomedical approach.
The project comprises three integrated parts. Multi-omics immune profiling in ovarian patient cohorts will generate personalized immunophenotyping tools. Meanwhile, engineered three-dimensional hybrid systems to model tumor–stroma interactions will be established for functional testing of ranked immunotherapeutics. By applying the immunophenotyping tools to address specific clinical questions, the group will actively enhance the understanding of underlying biology and identify additional biomarkers relevant to clinical decision-making. Moreover, they will develop an innovative approach for the localized administration of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cells using a peritoneal hydrogel at surgical sites, with subsequent validation in a surgical xenograft ovarian cancer model.
Based on the outcomes of these preclinical evaluations, a clinical trial program will be designed and prepared for initiation by the end of the study period.
The other supported projects are:
- Early embryonic epimutations and female cancer. PI: Stian Knappskog, University of Bergen, Faculty of medicine
- Young women with premature menopause - call for action to improve diagnostics and improve fertility. PI: Eystein Husebye, University of Bergen, Faculty of medicine
- SAFE ASM: Safe Treatment for Women needing Antiseizure medications - a multimodal translational and epidemiological approach, PI: Marte Helene Bjørk, University of Bergen, Faculty of medicine
We look forward to exciting research results!
See announcement from the TMF here (Norwegian only).